November 2018 Luncheon

Summary: NCEER is a new State-sponsored team of 15 North Carolina engineers who are trained and qualified to serve at disaster sites as North Carolina first responders. This concept is an outgrowth of the FEMA Structures Specialist (StS) role on Urban Search and Rescue teams.

The NCEER engineers are on-call with the North Carolina Emergency Management Division. They can be called up and assigned to NC Search and Rescue teams, local fire departments, or any other public agency that is facing an infrastructure disaster.

Speaker: Tom Caldwell is a Civil and Structural engineer. He graduated from the Colorado School of Mines in 1984 and earned his Masters at NC State. He is Chief Engineer at Atlas Engineering in Raleigh, where his primary work is in assessing damaged structures, and designing structural repairs.

Tom has served as an emergency response engineer with FEMA since 1997, and was recently selected to serve on the FEMA IST. Mr. Caldwell has been serving North Carolina agencies at emergency sites since 2005, and he is currently a member of NCEER and NC USAR Team TF8.